Tag Archives: puzzles

Immediately, that title might seem odd because I really did play the game. I really did get the 64 cube ending. I pushed all the buttons and shifted all the perspectives. What I mean by the title is that most of what I did in the game was informed by the viewers in chat while I was playing on Twitch, telling me what to do. Someone in chat explained to me how to read the tetronimo code throughout the game. Someone in chat googled all of my questions. Together, chat and I googled how to solve the damn waterfall puzzle. It was the most collaboration I think I’ve ever experienced with a video game, and I used to play the MOBA Smite daily. With friends. In person.

After awhile I figured out how to decipher the code on my own and wasn’t so dependent on chat to help me solve the puzzles. At one point, someone asked if I felt like the game was so easy now, since I was able to just breeze through puzzles that I used to have to literally just sit and stare at chat, waiting for the buffer delay so the smarter-than-me viewers could help me. I realized that I didn’t think it felt easier, I just felt like more of a badass. That in turn, surprised me. I usually feel a dose of guilt when I extensively google how to get through a game (I’M SORRY, BRAID. OKAY!? I’M SORRY) and I did the smallest percentage of original work yet puzzling through FEZ. But I felt more satisfied completing that game than I have felt completing any other game in the recent past.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that for the first time in a long time, I felt like this game wasn’t just me being lazy and googling, or not wanting to sit and think to figure something – this game was legitimately hard. In hindsight, I haven’t talked to anyone who has played FEZ who hasn’t googled at least one solution, usually more (that could probably expand to every player because no one figured out the Black Monolith room – the community solved it through collaborative brute force). For the first time, googling solutions was the norm, even for hard cores and fan bois. I was in the norm! There were multiple instances I scoffed at solutions to rooms and said “Right – like anyone could have figured that out . . . yeesh” but I suppose someone did first. But no one else did after that, heh. For whatever anyone thinks or says about Phil Fish and/or Polytron, FEZ is an amazing puzzle game. And even in it’s pixel art, it’s beautiful. A game that requires that kind of depth of thought is something to be admired regardless of your preferences or politics.

And I suppose to wrap up the sap, it really hit me at the end of this game that Twitch is all about community. Streamers are nothing without their chat and I had read that before but after this experience it became even more abundantly clear to me. And the people in chat don’t want to one up you or be annoying – they want to help. They want to work together with someone to play a game, together. The more I stream the more I learn. The more I stream, the more I want to learn. FEZ was a blast, but I doubt it wouldn’t’ve been quite as fun without the crowd.